In any given year, most advancement shops that work smart and with effort will focus on increasing either gift income or donor numbers. Those two metrics – gift income and donor numbers – are, easily, the most important when assessing the success of any given fundraising year. Occasionally, though, I’ll hear an advancement leader proudly […]

The Messenger The Message The Medium Those are the 3 most important variables when inviting a gift.  In that order. It doesn’t matter if it’s a modest annual gift, a major gift, or a planned gift.  That’s the order of importance. Who does the asking is, without fail, more important than the message.  And the […]

If you want to raise more major gifts – especially during our disrupted world of 2020 – the path is simple: Invite more prospective donors to make them. That’s it. Sure, you can fret all you’d like over the impacts of the pandemic. You can spend your time commiserating with colleagues about the disruptions caused […]

A class I had in graduate school still resonates with me.  It was a research methodology class and we had just completed reading a series of research articles about educational leadership that, seemingly, didn’t provide many fresh or new insights on the topic. In class one evening, a classmate of mine spoke up to our […]